On China by Henry Kissinger: review

No Western statesman has been more closely involved in the emergence of the new China than Henry Kissinger. A student and practitioner of foreign policy strategy for half a century, his is a sober and at times theoretical analysis, yet it tells a dramatic story in which personalities play crucial roles.

There are surreal moments, one of them a history-changing visit to Beijing by the Soviet leader Khrushchev in 1958, when Sino-Soviet tensions were incubating. To put the Russian leader at a disadvantage, the Chairman conducts their second meeting in his pool, with interpreters patrolling the sides. Khrushchev, who cannot swim, wears water-wings. Feeling his indignity he eventually crawls out and sits dangling his legs in the water. “Now I was on top, and he was swimming below.”

Another revealing farce came 13 years later, when the Chairman’s reckless baiting of the Russians on their long frontier during the Cultural Revolution backfired, forcing him to seek reinsurance with the United States after Moscow threatened a full-blown attack.

Eager to respond, Washington instructed its ambassador in Warsaw to approach Chinese diplomats there about upgrading their contacts. The occasion, quaintly, was a Yugoslav fashion show, but when the Americans sought to catch their eye the Chinese fled the scene, with the Americans running after them shouting that their president wanted a dialogue.

There followed Kissinger’s secret trip to China to prepare for the Nixon visit. There was never any question of the Chinese coming to America: two visits to Moscow apart, Mao never went abroad. Not that this prevented him discoursing to Kissinger and Nixon in magisterial fashion on events in a world of which he had no personal knowledge.

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But then if you regard yourself as humanity’s overlord, in the tradition of Chinese emperors, with other countries as tributaries with nothing to teach you, why trouble to see what the modern barbarians had to offer? His eventual successor Deng Xiaoping made numerous foreign trips and called openly for the import of Western know-how, with the results we have seen.

Kissinger rightly makes much of the continuity of China’s historical attitudes, even now: his appointments with its leaders were not scheduled, but “came about as if events of nature. There were echoes of emperors granting audiences.”

In strategic matters to this day the antique board game wei qi, where the aim is to encircle the adversary and avoid being surrounded, plays a role in Chinese thinking, along with the teachings about indirect attack and psychological combat in Sun Tze’s 2,500-year-old Art of War. So when China attacked India in 1962 over a disputed border, provoked Russia on the Amur river in 1969 and invaded Vietnam a decade later, the intention on each occasion was to hit hard and withdraw swiftly, simply to teach the adversary a lesson.

In practice it never quite worked, and there is a tension in the book between the idea of the Great Helmsman as strategic genius and his foreign policy failures. One reason he supported the North Korean attack on the South in 1950 was his conviction that the US would not intervene, and in 1969 the Russians declined to take their lesson quietly: their response was to bombard the Chinese side of the frontier so intensively the CIA said that from the air it looked like a moonscape, and sound out international opinion about a strike on China’s nuclear installations in Xinjiang province. Not too clever. To show that China could never be intimidated, Mao had mocked nuclear weapons as paper tigers, but he would not have been happy to see his own go up in flames.

Similarly it is hard to see the way Mao turned to the US virtually overnight as a demonstration of supreme resourcefulness. A true master of strategy does not put himself in a situation where such resourcefulness is so desperately required.

The book covers internal affairs only briefly, and Kissinger offers no definitive judgment on Mao’s domestic policies. By some his excesses will be seen, he writes, as a necessary evil. “By others the tremendous suffering Mao inflicted on his people will dwarf his achievements.”

Having witnessed the Cultural Revolution at first hand for three years maybe I am biased, but I would opt unhesitatingly for the second. Neither that horrendous event, nor the death of 40 million (not 20 million, as this book says) during the Great Leap Forward of 1958, both of which sprang directly from Mao himself, can on any account be described as necessary evils. The current Communist regime doesn’t see things that way – it sees them as monumental catastrophes – so why should anyone in the West?

Where we need Kissinger’s judgment is on the future of Sino-US relations, and here he is prudently optimistic. Rising powers – or in China’s case renascent powers – have a habit of asserting themselves, and at a time when the East wind seems to be prevailing over the West wind in significant respects, there is no lack of nationalistic forces in China. Yet conflict is by no means inevitable, as Kissinger sees it. If history were no more than endless repetition nothing would ever be transformed, and China and the US are not condemned to collision.

Instead, he envisages the gradual creation of a Pacific Community, on the lines of the Atlantic Community, in which “a shared world order becomes an expression of parallel national aspirations”. Regime change is off the agenda, and it is a mistake, he believes, to press too hard on human rights. Insofar as China and the West are contending political cultures, nuclear weapons will be a force for restraint, and competition will be largely economic. Nothing is guaranteed, but if anyone knows of a better hole to go to, he implies, the author would be interested to hear of it.

His book will satisfy neither America’s sinophobes nor its panda-huggers (as sentimentalists about China are called), but its reflections on strategy make a lot more sense than Mao ever did.

George Walden, a former diplomat specialising in China and Russia, is the author of 'China: A Wolf in the World?’ from Gibson Square Press